Tue, Jun 30 2020, 3:36 PM
Mortgage rates managed another slight improvement today, which means the average lender is offering new all-time low rates for the 4th time this month...
Tue, Jun 30 2020, 10:12 AM
Home prices continued to hold up on a national basis in April. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, covering all nine U.S. c...
Tue, Jun 30 2020, 8:50 AM
Some days you don’t learn much, other days you learn a lot (skip the ad). We’ve learned that COVID is driving our economy, not fundamental economic ne...
Mon, Jun 29 2020, 3:52 PM
Mortgage rates were unchanged to slightly lower today, bringing the average lender right in line with all-time lows . Averages aside, several lenders ...
Mon, Jun 29 2020, 2:59 PM
Lock vs Float Considerations With Rates at All-Time Lows
Stocks and bond yields are still in holding pattern...
Mon, Jun 29 2020, 1:38 PM
The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision along partisan lines, took a chunk out of the intentions the Dodd-Frank Act had for the Consumer Financial Protec...
Mon, Jun 29 2020, 10:28 AM
Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), predicted last month that April's home sales contract activity "will be...
Mon, Jun 29 2020, 9:15 AM
Does this mean we can no longer say, “Hindsight is always 2020”?! It’s too bad that the Tiger King is the most normal thing about 2020. For the people...
Mon, Jun 29 2020, 8:51 AM
This will be a deceptively informative week for financial markets. The biggest consideration continues to be the exponential growth of covid cases in...
Fri, Jun 26 2020, 4:44 PM
The fates of the economy, the housing market, and interest rates remain closely intertwined with coronavirus. The pandemic is clearly responsible for ...
Fri, Jun 26 2020, 4:41 PM
The Trend is Officially Broken. Welcome Back To The Range
Bond yields moved lower today, thus breaking out ...
Fri, Jun 26 2020, 10:00 AM
There are plenty of tricks in any trade. Just-opened cellulose sponges are already damp because many are premoistened with sterile water. (Without H20...
Fri, Jun 26 2020, 9:45 AM
After three weeks of declining totals, Black Knight says the number of active COVID-19 forbearance plans shot up over the past week. As of June 23, th...
Fri, Jun 26 2020, 8:31 AM
Although markets are still sideways relative to the bigger volatility of the previous 3 weeks, bond yields have trickled lower this week. This brought...
Thu, Jun 25 2020, 4:13 PM
Mortgage rates moved modestly lower today, bringing the average lender very close to all-time lows . The caveat continues to be that day-to-day rate c...
Thu, Jun 25 2020, 2:50 PM
Lots of Indecision, But The Outcome Should Make Sense
Both stocks and bonds are trading sideways after takin...
Thu, Jun 25 2020, 2:03 PM
In his analysis of current mortgage credit tightening for the Joint Center on Housing Studies excerpted here earlier, Don Layton included a special se...
Thu, Jun 25 2020, 9:08 AM
Let's get the housekeeping out of the way first. With so much talk in the news about the coronavirus effect on GDP, I figured I'd point out that toda...
Thu, Jun 25 2020, 9:02 AM
Some things are uncertain, like whether colleges, driven by ticket & TV income, bring back their football players when the rest of the student body “r...
Wed, Jun 24 2020, 3:28 PM
Rising Rates Thwarted By Coronavirus Concerns
Stop us if you've heard this one before, but rates are low due...
Wed, Jun 24 2020, 3:26 PM
Mortgage rates moved modestly lower today, but face an uphill battle in general. They fell very quickly as coronavirus first hit financial markets. Th...
Wed, Jun 24 2020, 10:08 AM
House prices continued to be unfazed by the current economic upheaval. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) reports that its U.S. House Price Ind...
Wed, Jun 24 2020, 9:30 AM
Stop us if you've heard this one before, but rates are low due to an unprecedented global emergency. Unless coronavirus situations deteriorates signif...
Wed, Jun 24 2020, 9:07 AM
Companies worldwide are grappling with continued travel bans, and how to bring back employees in waves, if at all. Others are re-designing office layo...
Wed, Jun 24 2020, 8:15 AM
The nine-week string of increases in purchase mortgage applications came to an end last week and refinancing volume pulled back as well. Consequently,...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 4:16 PM
It seems almost melodramatic to refer to any modest increase in mortgage rates these days. If we were to go over each lender's rate sheet with a fine ...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 4:16 PM
Decent Day For MBS But Broader Trend Remains a Concern
Rates are low. Unless coronavirus wins (or looks like...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 10:59 AM
After its pandemic-related plunge in April, the rapid recovery of the Housing Market Index, a measure of builder confidence, seems justified by today'...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 10:21 AM
With its so-called GSE Patch set to expire on January 10, 2021 (unless by some miracle the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs) en...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 10:20 AM
A paper written for the Joint Center on Housing Studies at Harvard University focuses on the causes and effects of mortgage credit tightening in the c...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 9:15 AM
There are all kinds of things that I don’t, or didn’t, know. For example, the other day I learned that when dogs lap water, they’re actually scooping ...
Tue, Jun 23 2020, 8:42 AM
We've definitely seen Treasuries improve relative to MBS more often than not in the past week or two. The most obvious driving force behind that ph...
Mon, Jun 22 2020, 5:06 PM
Mortgage rates held their ground today, with the average lender in roughly the same shape as they were on Friday. Incidentally, that's great shape! Wh...
Mon, Jun 22 2020, 3:06 PM
Locking vs Floating Remains a Question of Covid vs The Economy
Rates are low. Unless coronavirus wins, rates...
Mon, Jun 22 2020, 11:16 AM
Existing-home sales fell again in May, although only at a little more than half the rate of decline in April. Still, it marked the third month of fall...
Mon, Jun 22 2020, 9:58 AM
Black Knight reports another breathtaking increase in mortgage delinquencies in its "first look" at May loan performance data. The rate, which soared ...
Mon, Jun 22 2020, 9:42 AM
After nearly 100 years, Eskimo Pie ice cream will get a new name . (The name "Eskimo" is commonly used in Alaska to refer to Inuit and Yupik people, a...
Mon, Jun 22 2020, 8:55 AM
The bond market is starting the day fairly flat. Each of the past 4 trading days has seen yields end lower than they began. And over the past two we...
Fri, Jun 19 2020, 4:33 PM
Putting MBS Underperformance in Perspective
Rates are low. Unless coronavirus wins, rates should continue to...
Fri, Jun 19 2020, 4:32 PM
Coronavirus hit markets with unprecedented force in March. Stock prices and bond yields sank. When the outlook grew less dire, markets began moving ba...
Fri, Jun 19 2020, 9:49 AM
The number of homeowners in active forbearance plans fell again this past week. Black Knight estimates there are now 4.6 million people remaining in t...
Fri, Jun 19 2020, 8:55 AM
Lots in the news. Congratulations to the California MBA (and the MBA and lenders everywhere, since nearly 25% of residential loans come from Californi...
Thu, Jun 18 2020, 8:17 PM
Mortgage rates improved modestly today as investors remain cautious amidst rising coronavirus stats in several states. The experience of those states ...
Thu, Jun 18 2020, 3:10 PM
Sideways Victory For Bonds and Rates
We've been tracking both a sideways trend and an uptrend in bond yields...
Thu, Jun 18 2020, 11:28 AM
The dominance of conventional lending continued to grow in May . Ellie Mae's Origination Insight Report says those loans made up 82 percent of origina...
Thu, Jun 18 2020, 10:43 AM
Freddie Mac's Economic and Housing Research Group says say that, heading into summer, the housing market is rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic's da...
Thu, Jun 18 2020, 9:12 AM
Capital markets folks focus on risk management every day. The public is getting a taste of another kind of risk management when they go to a bar, tatt...
Thu, Jun 18 2020, 8:34 AM
The bond market had been very flat with yields near all time lows since mid-April. If there was any predisposition toward strength or weakness during...
Wed, Jun 17 2020, 5:06 PM
Mortgage rates joined many other sections of financial markets today in doing almost absolutely nothing . Both stocks and bonds were almost perfectly ...
Wed, Jun 17 2020, 4:36 PM
There has apparently been considerable confusion regarding servicer obligations to report to credit agencies regarding loans in forbearance. The origi...
